The Queer Politics of Writing on Race

When Sue O’Connell, the publisher and editor of the Boston-based LGBTQ newspaper “Bay Window,” which I also write for, penned her piece “Sharing our experience: White gay men and black men have more in common than they think,” a firestorm erupted. Evidence of the conflagration was not only seen on the paper’s website but it was also buzzed about around town.

Responses to the piece created a deluge of criticism ranging from thoughtful advice to damning personal attacks. The fury O’Connell’s piece ignited raised for me this query: “Can white LGBTQs suggest or give advice to communities of color from their own experiences of discrimination?”

It’s a polemic that has been avoided because of the politics of political correctness as well as the ways in which any discussion on race, no matter who’s steering the conversation—a rabid racist, the president or Attorney General Eric Holder—invariably inflames our emotions more than informs our faculties.

Many communities of color contest that white people—straight or LGBTQ—show no real vested interest in engaging in this country’s needed dialogue on race. And many whites have confessed their aversion to such a dialogue, stating that while a cultural defense of “white guilt” plays a role in their reticence so too does their cultural fear of “black rage” for inadvertently saying the wrong thing.

What further complicates the dialogue on race is a perceived as well as a real avalanche of attacks coming from communities of color spewing how whites are as unconsciously racist as they are incurably so. This, too, leaves the needed dialogue on race in the balance.

But with the dominate LGBTQ community’s continued indelicate dance of white privilege and single-issue platforms thwarting efforts for coalition building with communities of color the notion, for some people of color, that white marginalized and struggling groups (white women, LGBTQ, the poor, to name a few) in this country might have something to offer communities of color in terms of advice and/ or shared (not same) experiences appears absolutely preposterous.

And it is also equally absurd to think that they don’t.

But how, then, do we, as an entire LGBTQ community, broach our needed dialogue on race?

My answer: past harms need to be redressed.

For example, civil rights struggles in this country, unfortunately, have primarily been understood and demonstrated as tribal and unconnected rather than intersectional and interdependent.

As for our queer community one way to broach our needed dialogue on race is to address white LGBTQs appropriating from people of color’s history of struggle and then whitewashing it as solely their own.

Case in point, the inspiration and source of an LGBTQ movement post-Stonewall is an appropriation of a black, brown, trans, and queer liberation narrative and struggle. The Stonewall Riot of June 27 to 29, 1969 in Greenwich Village started on the backs of working-class African-American and Latino queers who patronized that bar. Those brown and black LGBTQ people are not only absent from the photos of those nights but they also have been bleached from its written history. Many LGBTQ blacks and Latinos continue to argue that one of the reasons for the gulf between whites and themselves is the fact that the dominant queer community rewrote and continues to control the narrative of Stonewall.

For many years I taught a college-level course titled “Power and Privilege,” exploring how many of our stereotypes about people whom we perceive as being different invades our lives without much conscious deliberation on our part. Issues of race, gender, social class, sexual orientation, age and ability, among others, were considered, and how such distinctions often lead to an inequitable distribution of political power, social well-being, and the resources available to individual members of society.

On the syllabus I laid out the rules regarding classroom interaction:

We will address our colleagues in our classroom by name.

We will listen to one another—patiently, carefully—assuming that each one of us is always doing the best that s/he can. We will speak thoughtfully. We will speak in the first person.

Although our disagreements may be vigorous, they will not be conducted in a win-lose manner. We will take care that all participants are given the opportunity to engage in the conversation.

We will own our assumptions, our conclusions, and their implications. We will be open to another’s intellectual growth and change.

We cannot be blamed for misinformation we have been taught and have absorbed from our U.S. society and culture, but we will be held responsible for repeating misinformation after we have learned otherwise.

We each have an obligation to actively combat stereotypes so that we can begin to eradicate the biases which prevent us from envisioning the well being of us all.

O’Connell blundered in her piece— partly because of factual inaccuracies but also because of the assumption that the community was equipped to have a civil conversation on race.

Rev. Irene Monroe

Friday, 16 August 2013

Posted on August 17, 2013

DISCLAIMER: The opinions expressed here are those of the individual contributor(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the LA Progressive, its publisher, editor or any of its other contributors.

About Rev. Irene Monroe

Rev. Irene Monroe is a Ford Fellow and doctoral candidate at Harvard Divinity School. One of Monroe’s outreach ministries is the several religion columns she writes - “The Religion Thang,” for In Newsweekly, the largest lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender newspaper that circulates widely throughout New England, “Faith Matters” for The Advocate Magazine, a national gay & lesbian magazine, and “Queer Take,” for The Witness, a progressive Episcopalian journal. Her writings have also appeared in Boston Herald and in the Boston Globe. Her award-winning essay, “Louis Farrakhan’s Ministry of Misogyny and Homophobia”, was greeted with critical acclaim.

Monroe states that her “columns are an interdisciplinary approach drawing on critical race theory, African American , queer and religious studies. As an religion columnist I try to inform the public of the role religion plays in discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people. Because homophobia is both a hatred of the “other ” and it’s usually acted upon ‘in the name of religion,” by reporting religion in the news I aim to highlight how religious intolerance and fundamentalism not only shatters the goal of American democracy, but also aids in perpetuating other forms of oppression such as racism, sexism, classism and anti-Semitism.”

Comments

1969 attack on black and brown gays. Since the late 1400s black people have been subjected to hostilities that defy description and still impact our worldview in 2013. Whether being gay is biological or a lifestyle choice, the distinction is the difference when race is interjected. Whether you are a white, black, brown, yellow, red or collage of colors, you can go through life without ever being physically identified as gay by the naked eye. That is not the case with being black or brown and that has to be taken into consideration when discussing the struggle for equality. The whitewashing of the seminal event for gays in 1969 further exacerbates the divide between these cohorts. The mere fact that race emerges as a factor within the gay struggle is therefore problematic and has to be dealt with before any meaningful discussion can be had about coalescing with blacks and others.

LGBT Rights

Irene Monroe: Long before June officially became Gay Pride Month, and October “Coming Out Month” for the LGBTQ community, Halloween was unofficially our yearly celebrated “holiday,” dating as far back at the 1970s when it was a massive annual street party in San Francisco’s Castro district.

The Middle East

Richard Greeman: Anti-government demonstrations spread across Morocco after social media spread the story of Mousine Fikri, a fishmonger crushed to death inside a garbage truck as he tried to block the destruction of a truckload of his fish confiscated by police.